Author: luimbe

Thank You.

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(video below: President Obama thanks Veterans in Seoul, South Korea)

Thank you to veterans and their families on this Veterans Day.

Childress never had player respect

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I have been light on sports lately, but I had to comment on the Brad Childress vs. Moss/Harvin/Vikings Locker room story. Childress’ propensity for poor leadership was evident 3 years ago when he decided to fine WR Troy Williamson for missing a game to attend his grandmother’s funeral (which he paid for and organized).

Based on his 2007 salary of $435,000, the action by the Vikings will cost the three-year veteran $25,588. Williamson has 45 days to appeal Minnesota’s decision to withhold his pay, and NFL Players Association sources said he will do so.

Coach Brad Childress told Twin Cities-area media following Thursday’s practice that the decision was on a “business principle” of the Vikings organization.

“He had a family obligation that he had to see to,” Childress said. “We sat down and talked on it before he left. … He had to do what he had to do. Everybody handles that differently. [Williamson] had to do what his family situation called for.”

…

Williamson’s maternal grandmother, who helped to raise him and with whom he was very close, died last week and he returned to South Carolina, where he played a large role in arranging her funeral. He also had to make travel arrangements for several of his siblings, some of whom are in the armed services. He returned to the team on Wednesday as the Vikings began practicing for this Sunday’s game against Green Bay.

via ESPN.com – Vikes dock Williamson’s pay for missing game for grandmother’s funeral.

Later, players let Childress know that this was unacceptable.

Grieving Troy Williamson will get his last game check back.

Vikings coach Brad Childress called reporters Saturday to share the news, citing a need to change course that “came ringing back” to him following a weekly meeting with the veteran players on his leadership committee.

via Vikings to give back Williamson game check – NFL – ESPN.

Childress put a “business principle” over a player’s family values and didn’t see anything wrong with that until players who earned respect of the locker room and staff of the Vikings had to explain to him how nutty he was. It comes as no surprise that the players and now the owner are turning on him.

One veteran said: “I think there was a great window of opportunity this past week to make a change.”

That player says the issues are the same as in recent years but have become more intolerable because of the team’s 2-5 record. He says Childress has never been popular in the locker room.

One player described Childress as untrustworthy. Another said: “The players have had enough of his BS. He needs to go.”

via Some Minnesota Vikings think Brad Childress should be fired – ESPN.

An empirical review of the performance of the Vikings team under Childress would lead to the conclusion that Childress deserves another year to right the course of the team. All reviews of Childress’ leadership lead to the conclusion that he needs to go.

Childress wasted a third round pick with the impulsive, unauthorized (yet deserved) firing of Randy Moss and this week, got into an argument with Percy Harvin while accusing him of not exerting enough effort in a walk through while he was legitimately injured. He regularly castigates these players for a lack of effort and excused absences and yet he has established a star system where he has sent special delegations to convince 41 year old Brett Favre to jump into the starters role while not attending a full training camp in each of the last two seasons.

Part of an NFL head coaches job is establishing a system where results, effort and professionalism are rewarded. Childress just isn’t able to do that. He’s better off being an offensive coordinator. Video of the ESPN report on the turmoil in the Vikings locker room is below.

A tragedy of negligence

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Of course, the sad truth about the death of University of Notre Dame football team’s cameraman is that it didn’t have to happen.

Therefore, I can say with full confidence that the death of Declan Sullivan was not only preventable, but should have been prevented, and that Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and coach Brian Kelly should pay for the tragedy with their jobs.Every professional cameraman has horror stories about shooting from scissor lifts. My guys this week all nodded grimly and knowingly when the news broke. No one was surprised. Many of them refuse to go up on a scissor lift in anything but perfect, windless conditions, such as those we had Saturday in Florida. And these arent fraidy cats — they have shot out the door of helicopters during boat races and jumped the wall in NASCAR pits and gotten in the way of angry bulls on rodeo shoots. Yet the idea that Sullivan would mount the scissor lift in conditions far from ideal shocked them.

via FOOTBALL OUTSIDERS: Innovative Statistics, Intelligent Analysis | One Foot Inbounds: Tragedy Off The Field.

Notre Dame has been playing like a second rate football team and this young man’s death speaks to the fact that this AD and Head coach are running a second rate program.

Latino Vote & the Democratic Senate

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Latino Voters swung heavily Democratic in 2010 midterms. Adam Serwer concludes:

Latinos are so diverse culturally that the only reason they vote as a bloc at all is because they continue to have collective interests as Latinos. That has more to do with a shared experience of discrimination than a shared culture; the more immigration policy becomes pretext for targeting Latinos, the more likely they are to vote this way. That said, the victories of Republican candidates like Susana Martinez, Marco Rubio, and Brian Sandoval show that they can blunt this trend in the short term by nominating Latino candidates for higher office. Right now, in the long term, Latinos are still a swing vote.

via Adam Serwer Archive | The American Prospect.

I really believe many of these GOP statehouses and governors will begin to pass laws like AZ’s SB 1070 and make Tea Party, GOP and Blue Dog legislators unacceptable to the majority of Latino constituencies heading into 2012. Lawrence O’Donnell invited Maria Teresa Kumar, Executive Director/Co-Founder of Voto Latino on the Last Word to run the numbers down on Latino turnout in the Senate races.

FTC’s taps Ed Felten Chief Technologist

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Edward Felton is in as the FTC’s first Chief Technologist and it seems like a damn good choice.

In the last decade alone, Felten and his students and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (where Ars alumnus Tim Lee currently hangs his hat) have broken the music industry’s SDMI encryption scheme, filed a lawsuit agains the RIAA, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation board, and showed us all how to break a badly secured e-voting machine in under one minute. They also manage to run the popular “Freedom to Tinker” blog.

via FTC’s first Chief Technologist: DRM basher Ed Felten.

Here is Felton discussing the issues with electronic voting machines. It’s geek talk, but it’s five minutes. Watch it. What he says about paper records for each voter is key. (You get a receipt at an ATM, you need one for your vote too.)

Breitbart’d: Rep. Etheridge Edition

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What I wrote about this incident in June:

UPDATE: To be clear. Not to say Etheridge is a good guy, but until they have a full video that shows the actions of Breitbart’s team prior to engagement with the congressman, I won’t believe their account. Breitbart’s intent is to provoke their subject, distort the reaction in the worst possible light, and Etheridge made it easy, but I can’t trust the edited videos.

via Breitbart would have us believe Bob Etheridge is a maniac « luimbe.com

Come to find out, it is Breitbart and his little rascals who were behind this.

Have green screen, will use it

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Is it too much to ask that my election coverage not include Lester Holt on the MSNBC holodeck? Or John King playing around with the largest tablet PC ever? Or Martha Maccallum standing in the middle of a hologram of exit poll bar graphs? The overuse of gadgetry is simply ridiculous. Graphics are nice, but the light show is out of hand.

USB Glory Holes

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Please don’t do this. Even with USB drives not stuck in a wall. Just don’t do it.

Across New York, there are USB drives embedded in walls, buildings and curbs. The idea is to create an anonymous, offline file-sharing network in public space. The drives are completely public and anyone can plug in to drop and download files.

via Why Is There a USB Drive Sticking Out of This Wall?.

I hate this art project.

Vote!

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Here in PA, Joe Sestak and Dan Onorato. I’ll be out west in a few weeks. If you live out there, please let it still be Sen. Murray, Sen Boxer and Sen Reid when I visit.

Acknowledging wealth, Judging success

Executive pay vs. relative to average wage in the U.S.
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Executive pay vs. relative to average wage in the U.S.

Executive pay vs. relative to average wage in the U.S.

According to Andrew Sullivan, we should acknowledge success more.

Why are so many on the left incapable of acknowledging that many people who are rich – but, of course by no means all of them – earned it the hard way

via “The Successful” – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

It’s because many (not some) of them are still grossly overpaid and their largess serves as a drain on the earning potential of every employee in their company. Let’s look at Meg Whitman’s success:

Her worst decision at eBay — to buy internet phone service Skype for over $4 billion in 2005 — bled billions in eBay’s value. It was a huge waste of money whose consequences were passed on to employees and shareholders. The effects are still being felt by the company today, over five years after Whitman’s disastrous decision.

Whitman’s fabled $1 billion in wealth was acquired in the first few months of her tenure, well before she could muck the company’s bottom line up. That billion-plus that eBay’s directors handed Whitman was perhaps the easiest billion anyone has ever been handed in corporate history: eBay hired Whitman in March 1998, when the company was already the tech world’s darling. Just six months after she joined, eBay went public, making Meg Whitman an overnight billionaire thanks to stock options that allowed her to buy eBay stock at just 7 cents a share, and sell them on the market for as high as $170 per share.

via How Meg Whitman Failed Her Way to the Top at eBay, Collecting Billions While Nearly Destroying the Company | News & Politics | AlterNet.

We shouldn’t assume that wealth means success. The real problem here is executive pay in publicly traded companies. Many are overpaid vs. the real performance of their company under their leadership.

To add to the grievance, many executives did not seem to deserve such rewards. Extraordinary pay for great performance is fine, it is routinely said. But many executives have been paid a fortune for presiding over mediocrity. The Corporate Library, an American corporate-governance consultancy, last year identified 11 large and well known but poorly governed companies, including AT&T, Merck and Time Warner, where the chief executive had been paid at least $15m a year for two successive years even as the company’s shares had underperformed. Robert Nardelli received a $210m pay-off when he lost his job earlier this month even though the shares of his company, Home Depot, fell slightly during his six years in charge. Carly Fiorina, ejected from Hewlett-Packard almost $180m better off—including a severance payment of $21.6m—after a lacklustre tenure as chief executive, let it be known in her autobiography that money was not important to her. Not everyone believed her.

via A survey of executive pay: In the money | The Economist.

Some US and British executives are overpaid vs their peers from other nations within their own industry:

It has not only revealed a few high earners (a source of shame in Japan), but exposed wide divergences in pay, especially between Japanese nationals and a few foreign star executives. For example Nissan’s boss, Carlos Ghosn, earned around $9.5m last year—one hundred times the pay of Masamoto Yashiro, the departing boss of Shinsei Bank, who took home just $95,000. Sir Howard Stringer of Sony received more than $8m if stock options are included. His counterpart at Panasonic earned a modest $1.2m. Takeda Pharmaceutical paid its America-based global sales chief $6m, twice as much as its chief executive back in Japan.

Four non-Japanese executives of Shinsei Bank, which is around a quarter owned by the state following a bail-out in the late 1990s, have been forced out, in large part because of their seemingly outsized pay packages, which exceeded the $1m disclosure limit. Among them was the chief financial officer, Rahul Gupta, despite his having managed to increase the bank’s capital-adequacy ratio last year even as the bank suffered losses of more than $1.5 billion. Furthermore, the Shinsei executives’ pay was determined by an independent compensation committee of the board, unlike that of most of their Japanese peers.

via Japanese executive pay: Spartan salarymen | The Economist.

Whitman’s leadership was a cash drain on E-Bay. She was a huge wealthy failure. Same with Fiorna who boosted earnings by bleeding out talent with layoffs, not by improving HP. Let alone departing executives at Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, the US Auto makers and countless other organizations. When people don’t acknowledge the wealthy, it may be because they only are good at harnessing wealth for themselves. US executives have (on average) the largest disparity of yearly earnings vs. their workers of any industrialized nation. Sullivan needs to acknowledge that we need to be better at judging success before we applaud it.

Cookies that can’t be eaten

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Browsers need this.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bsabarnowl

Think you cleared all the offline data from your browser? Think again.

Where things really get grim is with the mobile version of Safari. Although this version of Safari doesn’t support Flash or Silverlight, the directories it uses to hold local storage are sandboxed off from all other applications, and there is apparently no way to delete this. To clear evercookie from an iPhone, White first had to jailbreak it and then run a script. Worse still, any application that uses a Web view to display HTML content also creates an individual risk; White’s script has to crawl through the entire phone’s directory structure to purge them all.

via It is possible to kill the evercookie.

Cleared all browsing data? Go here to clear your flash cookies. Trust me, they’re there.

I Want My Country Back!

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…And so does Transpo Secretary Ray LaHood (as found on Atrios):

This is something I’ve never really talked about, but growing up, I lived on the east side of Peoria. When I was growing up, I could walk to my grade school. We had one car, but we would bike everywhere we went. We could walk to the grocery store. In those days, we had streetcars and buses, which people used to get to downtown Peoria, which was probably five miles from my house. I used to take a bus to my dad’s business. I grew up in an era [of] livable neighborhoods and livable communities — what we’re really trying to offer to people around America. When there was no urban sprawl, when you didn’t have to have three cars, when there weren’t houses with three-car garages, everybody had one car.

via Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood talks about livable communities | Grist.

LaHood was born in 1945 in Peoria, Illinois (pop. 105,187 in 1940 to pop. 126,963 in 1970) and turned 18 in 1963. LaHood is describing a working, middle class city built for working class budgets where it is easy for working class people to get to and from work.

Wife Registered in FL, Husband Running in WV

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West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin has a new ad against his Republican opponent John Raese.

All the claims are true.

Roll Call confirmed Friday that Elizabeth Raese is registered to vote in both states but has not voted in West Virginia since 1998. But in an interview this week with Time magazine, she indicated that she would be — and has been — voting in West Virginia.

“We are West Virginians,” Elizabeth Raese said, according to Time reporter Jay Newton-Small. “We live here, we vote here, people know that. We also have a home in Colorado, but we’re not residents there either.”

Raese campaign spokesman Kevin McLaughlin said Elizabeth Raese does not remember the conversation with the Time reporter, but he added that, “If she did say this, she obviously misspoke.”

Though John Raese’s campaign has repeatedly confirmed that he lives and pays taxes in West Virginia, an investigation by the nonpartisan PolitiFact.com showed that his wife has been registered to vote in Palm Beach County, Fla., since 2001 and voted there in 2008.

Roll Call independently confirmed with Monongalia County (W.Va.) Clerk Carye Blaney that Elizabeth Raese is also registered to vote in Morgantown, W.Va., where she and her husband own a home, but she hasn’t voted there in 12 years.

Blaney said she requested and received certification from Palm Beach County on Friday that Elizabeth Raese has been living and voting there, so she will remove the candidate’s wife from the county voter rolls. Elizabeth Raese will not be able to vote in West Virginia in this year’s elections.

via CQ Politics | Raese’s Wife Loses W.Va. Voter Status.

Coupled with Raese’s campaign putting out a casting call for his commercial that needed actors to be “hicky” so they would closely resemble the stereotype West Virginia residents, I would guess this is pretty effective attack. I know in Pennsylvania, revelations that Rick Santorum’s family was living in Virginia and yet was attending an internet charter school on PA taxpayer’s dime helped to sway Republican friendly voters into Bob Casey’s column. Voters don’t like it when a candidate wants to represent their state and yet is too good to live in their state.

Lost and Found for Corpses

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The story of the Chinese cottage industry of “body fishing” is an interesting look at how capitalism is affecting the country’s culture. Body fishers live by pulling dead bodies out of the Yellow River and charging the families of the deceased to retrieve the remains.

While some of the 80 to 100 bodies Wei gathers each year are victims of accidents and floods, he thinks that the majority end up in the river after suicide or murder. There’s no overt sign of a crime spree, though there’s evidence of many people taking their own lives. Indeed, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in rural China , and 26 percent of all suicides in the world take place in the nation, according to the World Health Organization

via Chinese fisherman on Yellow River reels in corpses – Yahoo! News.

Apparently, corpse fishing used to be something fisherman would do for free as a sort of human courtesy. Now, bodies are only released in exchange for cash. The amount depends on the means of the person coming to retrieve the corpse.

For bodies that are claimed, Wei has a price system that is sensitive to the income level of his customers. He charges the equivalent of US$75 to a farmer who claims a body, $300 to someone holding a job and $450 when a company is the payee.

Other corpse snatchers are reported to charge $45 just to view a body (according to practice, bodies are kept face down in the river to preserve their features so that they will be recognizable to relatives) and nearly $900 for a claim.

via Asia Times Online :: China News, China Business News, Taiwan and Hong Kong News and Business..

There is a need for public service here, for public health reasons and to discourage people from trading in grief.